


washing machine heart

by magesamell



Category: Bravely Default (Video Game) & Related Fandoms
Genre: Character Study, F/M, i love my treason daughter, post-Bravely Default, pre-Bravely Second
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-30
Updated: 2018-09-30
Packaged: 2019-07-20 15:37:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16140275
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magesamell/pseuds/magesamell
Summary: It doesn’t matter if she’s lonely when she’s never alone. It doesn’t matter who she misses when she has people to protect.





	washing machine heart

She’s not sure how to act heartbroken.

It hurts, certainly, but the cut is so deep, too distant for the wound to irritate. Her hurt doesn’t linger at the surface. No, she bleeds internally, slowly, and it’s her business if every step she takes injures her that much more.

Agnes is a very strange mirror. Her holiness would never expose her pain in public, but behind the closed doors of airship cabins, Edea watches the tears fall free and fast.

“He’s gone,” Agnes sobs, “both of them — they’re just _gone_! Wh— why did this happen?”

Edea rubs her back, unused and ill suited to comforting others. She had never thought their victory would be like this. Not when they had stuck down a god and all lived to tell the tale. The four of them individually, collectively, were so intensely loyal — both to their quest but also to each other. In one world, in every world, they chose each other over petty self interest time and again.

But now Tiz and Ringabel were both beyond Edea and Agnes’ touch or understanding. Unfaltering bulwarks one day, intangible dead men the next.

Edea winces at the hitch of Agnes’ breath, the catch of her shoulders. She can’t keep still — she touches Agnes arm and brings her tea and a blanket.The restless clip at her heels refuses to let up, even for a second. Edea has to keep moving.

It doesn’t matter if she’s lonely when she’s never alone. It doesn’t matter who she misses when she has people to protect.

 _I’m still here_ , she thinks viciously, resentfully. Boys were useless and so Edea would live to fight another day. And another one after that, too.

 

-o-

 

She has a lot of memories of killing people who are still alive.

They surprise her, sometime, greeting her with smiles and nonchalance, and she can’t keep it out of her head. Blood rushing to her head. Cleaning her katana. The cold glass of the asterisk.

She’s not sure how much of it she regrets. Sometimes she remembers the things they said and did, and it makes her boil with rage. She knows now it was just Eternian arrogance, the whole lot of it. Stupidly believing you were saving the world. Justifying it to yourself. Shouting down anyone who said otherwise. If she swore off every stubborn, ignorant Eternian officer who committed unforgivable deeds in another universe, she couldn’t keep herself company.

No, that fight is over now. Kiss and make up. Forget and forgive.

But she’s never been particularly good at _that._

 

-o-

 

Sometimes Edea thinks she imagined him. The only tether is that battered diary. Several times she considers having it polished and rebound, before dismissing such a venture excessively vulnerable. Besides, she can’t just let _anyone_ near it. The thing has sensitive information, anyways. Also, he gave it to _her_. It’s meant _for her_.

Agnes would know what to do, but Agnes is on the other side of the continent.

It doesn’t help that Alternis is always...around, with the same, unchanging awkward attitude. Edea knows he’s shying away from her. She tries, anyway, to get to know him. Looks desperately for a man she knows isn’t there. Because Alternis didn’t fall through worlds and Alternis didn't spend months teasing and tormenting and having breakfast and fighting alongside her. Alternis didn’t lose his every one of his memories but remember her. Alternis didn’t die again and again and again from the trauma of it all. Alternis never learned how to cope. Never learned how to laugh with her.

Alternis isn’t Ringabel. And Edea doesn’t want him to be. She wouldn’t wish Ringabel’s life on Alternis.

And so she decides herself a selfish creature. Wishing for a man to endure trauma beyond human capacity. Wishing she’d feel less guilty when she saw him. Guilty for countless things. Guilt beyond any and all helping.

Alternis, for all his supposed undying love, is helpless and nervous around her. Truly, he avoids her like the plague. And she’ll eat her katana before she pursues a man who won’t go after her.

That’s the rub, isn’t it?

 

-o-

 

Edea makes her decision long before she even meets with the astrologer. Ringabel’s not coming back.

Even so, she hesitates in her room at high command, her finger stumbling over the worn leather of the diary. She could take it with her. She could keep his memory nearby. 

Or, she could leave the memory here, in Eternia, out of reach of the empire. Make it something she could return home to. Once she makes sure she will have a home again to fight for.

And if she did that…maybe she could forget about it. She’s sure she could, if she set her mind to it. All the stories she’s ever read of heartbroken girls either end with them finding a new lover or, you know, dying.

There’s far too much fight in Edea for her to die of something as trite as love.

No, she readies her katana. She’s not suited for a broken heart. She’s suited for battle and the harsh Eternian winter and doing what has to be done, what no one else will do because everyone is too scared or greedy or self-obsessed. She’s not suited for a broken heart, but she never was suited for loving him to begin with.

It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. She’ll leave him here and forget him. She doesn’t need the diary to remember, anyway. Edea remembers everything about him.

**Author's Note:**

> say hello on [tumblr](http://marinxttes.tumblr.com)


End file.
